Stochastic terror and the non-stochasticity of application

I’ve recently become aware of a new phrase; stochastic terrorism

This blisteringly inane phrase is being used as a justification for censorship. When I first saw this phrase I had no idea what it meant. Was it the terror equivalent of genderfluidity where you would choose to blow people to shit on a Monday for some cause picked at random and then do the same thing on Wednesday for another cause picked at random?

Or was the randomness about the chosen methodology of your terrorism? Nail bombs on Friday, shotguns on Tuesday?

What new semantic hell had just descended upon us?

I had to look it up and here’s what dictionary.com had to say :

“the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted”

[Example] The lone-wolf attack was apparently influenced by the rhetoric of stochastic terrorism.

It has been around for some time, apparently, although I’ve only seen it for the first time recently. Whatever will the goons think of next?

So when Justin Trudeau said that unvaccinated people are very often racist and misogynist and asks “how should we tolerate them?” he was indulging in stochastic terrorism. Right. Gotcha.

Here’s another translation

“You mustn’t criticize someone because some nutjob might take it upon themselves to harm that individual”

Is this, then, the level of pathetic, simpering, snivelling, cowardly, whining wretches we have become? That we should be prevented from the calling out of people doing things we disagree with just in case, possibly, one day, somewhere, perhaps on a Tuesday at 3.47pm or then again perhaps closer to midnight, as long as it’s a dry day in November, in a leap year, maybe, in a town, perchance with the letter ‘T’ in its name, there could be some, wholly unspecified, potentially violent act committed by someone who may, or may not, have read or heard our criticism?

All this sounds a bit like a visit to your local palm-reader to have your fortune read, and I would suggest the term ‘stochastic terrorism’ has an equal degree of validity.

As I understand it, the term originates as a way to describe the Lone Wolf attack. It refers to ‘demonization’ which results in someone going off the deep end and doing something violent to the target of that ‘demonization’. The stochastic bit comes about because the specifics of the attack cannot be predicted (stochastic is, essentially, just a fancier more technical term for ‘random’), but the attack itself is assumed to be “statistically probable”.

Of what possible use is this absurd concept to anyone but those wishing for more control? Recall that it is not the perpetrator of the act itself who is being called a terrorist here, but the person, or persons, indulging in the act of ‘demonization’. If you consistently criticize, oh I don’t know, the son of some politician who has some juicy stuff on his laptop, then you might be a stochastic terrorist. Heaven forbid!

But let’s look at the banality of the definition in a bit more detail.

First off, what, precisely, is “demonization”? It’s another one of those things like ‘hate’ isn’t it? Somewhat in the eye of the beholder. Whilst there are clear examples of demonization (think the concerted act of the demonization of the Jews in Nazi Germany - by the government - here) where is the line drawn between legitimate harsh and sustained criticism and ‘demonization’? As we shall see, this line is easily drawn based on politics/ideology and not really on anything objective.

Then we have the connection ‘resulting in’. This is implying a causal relationship. It isn’t that the Lone Wolf is just fucked up in the head. No, it was all because of stuff they read and were influenced by. The implication, of course, is that it’s the ‘stuff’ that is at fault here, and not the nasty nutjob who felt compelled to act in a violent manner.

Of course, people can be influenced by what they read. A tiny, tiny fraction of people might be sufficiently unbalanced to act violently upon that. The whole direction here is one of safetyism again - the, allegedly, dangerous material is the problem, the thing that must be focused on. Again, if we consider religious extremism then it’s clear that someone can be ‘radicalized’. The left wing has argued for quite some time that, allegedly, right-wing ‘adjacent’ folk like Jordan Peterson, for example, are opening up the gates of extremist hell and, like some ideological pied piper, leading their followers down some dark and dangerous right-wing path.

It’s the usual ‘bait and switch’ tactic. You take something that does happen, or has happened, like the demonization of the Jews or the radicalization of religious extremists, and you use this to ‘legitimize’ the whole concept you’re trying to push - the existence of stochastic terrorism. Having done that, you apply it to far more innocuous things and criticisms.

The fact that millions and millions of people can read ‘extremist’ stuff and manage not to blow anyone up gets a bit lost. We need to be protected from those few weak-minded individuals who might be otherwise inclined. I agree with the sentiment. It would be great if we could protect people from the nutjobs - but I seriously question whether more control and censorship is the right way to do this. It’s another case of agreeing with the goals, but disagreeing with the methodology purported to achieve those goals.

But actually we need to read a little bit closer, because what the definition says is ‘resulting in the incitement of a violent act’. Not the perpetration of, but the incitement. Technically, this could mean that you write your criticism/‘demonization’ and someone then incites violence as a result, which then results in someone else committing a violent act - but you’re still the one indulging in stochastic terrorism.

We then come to the fascinating phrase “statistically probable”. This is a beauty. The implication they’re trying to convey is, of course, near certainty. The word ‘probable’ here is one which is essentially meaningless. Is something which occurs with a likelihood of 1 in 10 ‘statistically probable’?

All events which do not strictly have a probability of occurrence that is identically zero are ‘statistically probable’. That is, there is a possibility, however small, of the event occurring. The words statistically possible would have been a better choice here - but of course that wasn’t the nudge they were looking for.

Definitions aside, one then ponders further. Just how in the name of the sweaty jockstrap of destiny is one to determine whether something, in this context, is “statistically probable”? Just look at things and say “yup, looks statistically probable to me”? Maybe they just read the tea leaves that day. Or gazed lovingly into their crystal balls.

What an absolute shower of shite this whole concept of stochastic terrorism is.

It’s yet another meaningless and vague phrase to be added to the growing lexicon of useless and similarly vague concepts like structural racism, white privilege, de-colonization, toxic masculinity, rape culture, white fragility, whiteness, hate speech, taking up space, cultural appropriation and so on (and on and on and on and on and on . . . . .)

So how is this asinine phrase being used?

It has been widely applied to Libs of TikTok. I’m sure you’re all aware of this person, but just in case you don’t know, LoTT essentially just re-posts other people’s content. Sometimes with a minor comment, sometimes not. That’s it. She takes the videos produced by other people and simply reposts them. In other words, she takes something that was freely available for everyone to see and posts it again for everyone to see.

What a fucking terrorist, eh?

She has had her Facebook account permanently suspended for doing this.

Her recent ‘crime’ is to re-post the already publicly available videos from Boston’s Children’s Hospital which focus on their approach to the treatment of transgender children. This, the whiny woke wankers suggest, is stochastic terrorism. By bringing these videos to a potentially wider audience she is exposing the staff at the hospital to potential violence. She is even inciting violence apparently.

It’s not the people who actually generated the videos and their content doing this to themselves. Of course not. It’s the fact that someone paid attention and thought it would be good if maybe a few more people could see this material. What a terrible, awful, despicable person this LoTT must be!!!!

This is a great example of how the concept of ‘stochastic terrorism’ is being used in practice.

All LoTT is doing is to let people ‘demonize’ themselves.

But the alleged ‘demonization’ that LoTT has indulged in is, to use the terminology of the delightful Sam Harris, “infinitesimal compared to” the demonization that a certain orange-hued individual suffered and still suffers. But more on Sam “I don’t care about the corpses of children as long as Trump suffers” Harris¹, in a moment.

I’m not in the US and so I’m witnessing things ‘from afar’, so to speak. The Orange Man might be as corrupt and evil and despicable as they say he is. And, fuck me, have they said this time and time and time again - they’ve shouted it, they’ve screamed it, they’ve wailed it to the heavens in the media and on social media. So much so that the phrase “Orange Man Bad” became a pretty much accurate summary of 90% of the news articles I was reading.

He might be as bad as they say. What I haven’t seen, yet, is any compelling evidence that he is any of the things he is accused of being. What I have seen is the most extraordinary level of bare-faced misrepresentation of and lying about the Orange Man.

If this isn’t a clear case of stochastic terrorism then I don’t know what is. But, as they say, if some people didn’t have double standards they would have no standards at all. Take the 2016 and 2020 US elections. Trump ‘stole’ it, apparently, it wasn’t legitimate. All fine and dandy to make this claim. Wind forward to 2020 and criticizing THIS election has been likened to domestic terrorism (that word ‘terrorism’ again) and said to be undermining democracy.

And I do have some very serious criticisms of the 2020 election. As someone who worked on R&D for a European project on electronic voting there are 3 key things that need to be secured in an election. The authenticity of the person voting, the integrity of the vote cast, and the privacy of the voter. If you’re going to opt for a system that’s going to give you the most security headaches in each of these regards, is the least secure, and the most vulnerable to manipulation, then you’d choose a mass mail-in ballot.

But we’re not supposed to say things like that regarding the 2020 election, we’re supposed to view it as the most wonderful, secure, election ever undertaken on planet Earth, with an integrity higher than God’s. Or else you’ll be classed as a terrorist.

When it comes to the Orange Ogre anything, it seems, is justified. You can stochastically cast about your accusations with gay abandon. The people doing this, you see, are not indulging in stochastic terrorism, that’s what people like LoTT do. Not us. Never us. We don’t do anything like that.

Perhaps someone read the tea leaves and decided that violence against Trump was not ‘statistically probable’, despite the deranged levels of demonization that were applied.

And the derangement is very evident. In a recent interview on Triggernometry, Sam Harris essentially said that Trump was sooooooooooooooo bad that almost any measure was justified in order to undermine his election, or re-election. He really isn’t a normal human being in these people’s eyes, he’s like some fucking Darth Orange.

In Harris’ view, then, undermining a democratic election is OK to preserve democracy, if you’re undermining democracy to protect yourself from Darth Orange. You can see a clip here, but it’s probably worth watching the whole dumpster fire of an interview on the Triggernometry channel on YouTube.

Just to underline how deranged Sam appears to be, how about one of his statements made during the interview?

“Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared” (Sam Harris, 2022)

Here he was expressing the view that whatever Hunter may have done, it paled in comparison to the task of getting rid of Trump.

Stochastic terrorism is, clearly, uni-directional. Only one side of the ideological divide can actually do it. The other side is just too good, too morally justified, too pure, too wondrously angelic, to ever be thought of as stochastic terrorists.

The senseless shite that is “stochastic terrorism” is just another weapon in the ever-growing war on the freedom of expression and the right of dissent.

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1. Just to be fully clear here, I’m not quoting Harris directly, but paraphrasing what seems to me to be the intent of his comments during the interview.